A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe

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The Barnes & Noble Review
Before THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, the literary question of the day was, Could Tom Wolfe, the self-proclaimed avatar of the New Journalism, write fiction? After BONFIRE, that question quickly became, Yeah, but can he do it again? Delayed by a number of false starts, revisions, and in 1996, a heart attack and subsequent quintuple bypass surgery, the publication of A MAN IN FULL marks Wolfe's return to the literary arena after more than a decade of conspicuous absence.

A MAN IN FULL is a sprawling novel of Dickensian proportions and scope, a philosophical exploration of modern manhood, fin de siècle morality, political gamesmanship, and racial identity, all informed by the underlying themes of reinvention and rebirth. Gone are the era-encapsulating catch phrases of his previous books — there's no "radical chic," no "right stuff," no "me decade," or "masters of the universe" to be found here. Instead, Wolfe has devoted his considerable talents to grounding his fiction firmly in journalistic fact, and to addressing one of the most substantial criticisms leveled at BONFIRE — that its characters were little more than cardboard cutouts, one-dimensional caricatures artfully arranged in a variety of strategic postures. In the central protagonists of A MAN IN FULL, Charlie Croker, Conrad Hensley, and Roger White, Wolfe has created memorable characters that rise above stereotypes — thinking, feeling characters that surprise even themselves in pursuing the possibilities open to them.

The bulk of Wolfe's novel takes place in the de facto capitol of theNewSouth, and what better place to set a novel of rebirth than Atlanta? Twice rebuilt from the ashes of devastating conflagrations (a phoenix figures prominently in the city seal), Atlanta has a pragmatic history of remaking itself to suit the shifting allegiances of industry and social makeup. Not a "true Southern city like Savannah, Charleston, or Richmond," Atlanta's crass commercial heritage uniquely qualifies it for the role Wolfe has in mind. It is here that Charlie Croker, a former Georgia Tech football star known as the Sixty-Minute Man, has parlayed his gridiron fame into a vast real-estate empire. A formidable figure who, at 60, still considers himself connected to the "rude animal vitality of his youth," Charlie may not be a master of the universe, but he is certainly master of a domain that includes a 29,000-acre plantation in southwestern Georgia named Turpmtine (pronounced "T,u,r,p,m,t,i,n,e" — in the manner of the 19th-century slaves who produced the plantation's original product), a palatial home in Buckhead, an opulently appointed Gulfstream Five jet, and the underleased, overfinanced office tower in one of Atlanta's "edge cities" known as Croker Concourse. As the result of overextending himself to erect this massive boondoggle, Charlie finds himself in default to his creditors to the sum of $750 million. His largest creditor, PlannersBanc, is the first to welcome him to the sober '90s with the news that it's the "morning after...and Croker Global's got the biggest hangover in the history of debt defalcation in the Southeastern Yew-nited States."

In the brilliantly executed chapter that follows, Charlie and Croker Global are given a humiliating "workout" by the bank's aptly named Real Estate Asset Management Department (REAMD) for gross mismanagement of funds. (Trust Wolfe to ferret out the one interesting aspect of banking and to portray it convincingly.) Faced with the prospect of losing his beloved Turpmtine, not to mention his Gee-Five and the $7 million personal dividend he reaps from the company each year, Charlie does what any beleaguered capitalist would do — he lays off workers in Croker Global's underperforming food division.

On the opposite side of the country, this arbitrary decision results in the swift and utter disfranchisement of Conrad Hensley, 23-year-old husband and father of two. Responsible, conscientious, and painfully naïve, Conrad dreams of attaining the bourgeois life he read about during his brief career in Community College. "Order, moral rectitude, courtesy, co-operation, education, financial success, comfort, respectability, pride in one's offspring, and, above all, domestic tranquillity" are his ideals. The bewildering descent from a body-and-soul killing job in the Croker Global Freezer Warehouse to his fateful confrontation with the authorities — a series of missteps that begins with a degrading job interview, progresses to his car being wrongfully impounded, and ends with Conrad doing jailtime for aggravated assault in the Santa Rita Correctional Facility — is a haunting evocation of the powerlessness and humiliation of life at rock bottom. Wolfe memorably satirizes this manifestation of Reagan-era "trickle-down" economics in an episode where Conrad is treated to a jailhouse baptism by "pizzooka." (If you can't summon up an appropriate mental image of this process, you're just not trying.) Only the timely arrival of a book of Stoic philosophy (Conrad had requested a bestselling legal procedural titled THE STOIC'S GAME, and instead received a copy of THE STOICS) and the nearly incoherent reassurances of his Hawaiian cellmate, Five-O, keep him going.

Meanwhile, back in Atlanta, the novel's racially charged subplot is beginning to simmer. Roger White II, a successful black attorney (he cannot yet bring himself to embrace Jesse Jackson's coinage, "African-American"), has been summoned to the Buckhead manor of Georgia Tech football coach Buck McNutter to deffuse a potentially explosive incident: The daughter of one of Atlanta's most powerful (white) businessmen has privately accused Georgia Tech's star running back, Fareek "The Cannon" Fannon, of date-raping her during Freaknic weekend. Roger, a light-skinned blueblood whose tastes run to Stravinsky and bespoke suits (his detested nickname is Roger "Too" White), is given the unenviable task of approaching his childhood friend and fellow Morehouse Man Wes Jordan — now mayor of Atlanta — for help in containing the situation. But Andreé Fleet, a "blacker-than-thou" opportunist who rails against the complicity of "beige half-brothers" and bluntly proclaims that it is "high time Atlanta had its first...BLACK MAYOR," seeks to exploit Fannon's predicament for his own political ends. And unless Roger and Wes can enlist an unlikely ally from Atlanta's white elite, the city is certain to erupt along its racial fault lines.

How Wolfe joins these three major plot lines, along with an assortment of minor, but no less captivating threads, is nothing less than astonishing. Those who may find the quasi-religious elements of the denouement a bit far-fetched need only consider the rapid growth and alarming influence of certain less palatable "philosophies" such as the Church of Scientology to see how plausible Wolfe's conceit really is.

An inveterate cultural beachcomber, Wolfe sometimes goes too far — and other times not far enough — in spiking his narrative with his latest pop discoveries. His attempts at rap lyrics are predictably hilarious, and in all fairness, he may well have intended them to be. What else could explain a "Country Metal" band named "The Pus Casserole"? Puns on the order of a faithful black retainer referred to as "Auntie Bella," or a law firm called "Wringer Fleasom & Tick" fare better. A fussily dressed 68-year-old white guy can be forgiven, perhaps, for rhyming "akimbo" with "bimbo," but was it really necessary to use it four times over the course of the book? (Novelists take note: One "akimbo" per book, please.) Wolfe has always had a fascination with physical appearances, not least his own. But in A MAN IN FULL, physiognomy has become an obsession. Not a chapter elapses without a thorough cataloguing of bodily attributes. The constant carnal barrage of mesomorphs, endomorphs, stringy-necked jogging junkies, slim-hipped trophy wives, thick-torsoed jowly matrons, broad shoulders, massive necks, prodigious forearms, and loamy loins — nearly forgot the mantra, "boys with breasts" — takes a wearying toll after 700 pages. Similarly, what are we to make of the constant transliteration of Charlie's cracker dialect? These parentheticals are certainly useful for deciphering jailhouse gang-slang and Five-O's mystifying pidgin, but surely the one lasting contribution of the Carter presidency is that most of us are able to recognize a Georgia accent! Lastly, is there anyone on this planet — not born into a New Guinea cargo cult — who needs Tom Wolfe to explain the iconography of Michael Jackson and his trademark glove?

These are minor complaints in a novel of this complexity and wit, noticeable only because so much of Wolfe's eavesdropping is spot on. There isn't a wrong note in the dynamic between Roger White and Wes Jordan — black elitists learning late in their careers the political value of nurturing the African American within. The minutely choreographed interplay between Atlanta's movers and shakers at the opening of a homoerotic art exhibit is a dramatic marvel. And however painful, Wolfe's depiction of the social invisibility endured by the discarded first wives of corporate captains like Charlie Croker has the ugly sting of truth. But then, like an impish Puck holding up a mirror to all humanity, Wolfe has made a career of showing us our ugly truths.
—Greg Marrs

From the Publisher

The setting is Atlanta, Georgia — a racially mixed, late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth and wily politicians. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta conglomerate king whose outsize ego has at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 29,000 acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife, and a half-empty office complex with a staggering load of debt.

Meanwhile, Conrad Hensley, idealistic young father of two, is laid off from his job at the Croker Global Foods warehouse near Oakland and finds himself spiraling into the lower depths of the American legal system.

And back in Atlanta, when star Georgia Tech running back Fareek “the Canon” Fanon, a homegrown product of the city’s slums, is accused of date-raping the daughter of a pillar of the white establishment, upscale black lawyer Roger White II is asked to represent Fanon and help keep the city’s delicate racial balance from blowing sky-high.

Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real estate syndicates — Wolfe shows us contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most admired novelist. Charlie Croker’s deliverance from his tribulations provides an unforgettable denouement to the most widely awaited, hilarious and telling novel America has seen in ages — Tom Wolfe’s most outstanding achievement to date.

The New York Times Book Review - Michael Lewis

The novel contains passages as powerful and as beautiful as anything written -- not merely by contemporary American novelists but by any American novelist. . .The book is as funny as anything Wolfe has ever written; at the same time it is also deeply, strangely affecting.

Time Out New York - Ben Greenman

Wolfe's white-suit, black-mask act runs out of both time and energy...While the problems raised by the novel are serious ones, and Wolfe's comic treatment of them frequently wonderful, A Man in Full is not quite a book in full.

Literary Review - Rhoda Koening

A Man in Full is actually a rather frail little fictional lamb — a simple story so loaded with sets and costumes it can hardly move....[It] will impress readers who measure literary merit with a fact-counter. But its narrative and characterisation are so wanting that it is hardly a novel at all.

Malcolm Jones

Wolfe's high-spirited description of the decline and fall of Atlanta real estate developer Charlie Croker is the hands-down literary event of the year....He's hip-deep in rave reviews...."He stirs debate and makes people think," says Joyce Carol Oates. —Newsweek

The American Spectator - John O'Sullivan

Wolfe takes characters of different backgrounds and social standing and traces how each of them pursues (and sometimes radically alters) his own concept of honor in a society that no longer offers them either compass or stars to steer by.

People

Wolfe is a peerless observer, a fearless satirist, a genius in full.

USA Today

A masterpiece.

Newsweek - George F. Will

. ..[A] great rooftop yawp of a novel....it strikes chords of anxieties about the nation's character....more caricature than portraiture, although caricature can, and here does, rise to literature....America, seen steadily and whole, is better than this. Perhaps Wolfe's third novel will be a happier — more realistic — yawp.

New York Times Book Review

The novel contains passages as powerful and as beautiful as anything written — not merely by contemporary American novelists but by any American novelist.... The book is as funny as anything Wolfe has ever written; at the same time it is also deeply, strangely affecting.

Commentary - Christopher Caldwell

...Tom Wolfe has identified some of the real difficulties that best the modern novelist, and ...has made a strenuous effort — a manly effort — to show us what a remedy would look like....[H]e has fashioned vividly fresh scenes...and he has brought to bear spectacular satiric gifts.

Book Magazine

Tom Wolfe is one fine reporter. His second shot at the novel form is thoroughly reported, full of facts and figures and details. Scenes and subplots are so abundant in subcultural minutiae that they could be spun off into movies. Thus, after an immersion in A Man in Full, a reader can't help but be slightly educated about: how to move frozen food in a refrigerated warehouse; how real-estate development debts are created and recouped; how to shoot quail and distinguish the males from the females; how a rattlesnake moves and how to catch one barehanded; how to make a prison knife out of a hardback book cover; or how to talk like a Baker County, Georgia, native, a bank loan "workout artist" or a financial geek. And with Wolfe's frenetically verbalized, punctuated and italicized prose, the ride is a constantly entertaining one.

What makes this a novel, though, is that Wolfe turns his documentarian's gaze to cultural and moral mores as well as to technical procedures. And thus he comes up with The Bonfire of the Vanities II. A Man in Full is a dissertation suggesting that the obsessive compulsions of a society so concerned with all that is physical, temporary and grandiose has as its only hope a return to . . . Stoicism. And just about nobody is going to choose that, Wolfe suggests.

Charlie Croker, a nearly-broke egomaniacal 60-year old Atlanta real-estate developer and former sports hero (whose physical attributes are described in a near-caress of awestruck detail) is leaned on by his bank for money he doesn't have. With the end near (his beloved private Gulfstream jet repossessed), local Atlanta politicos (super-described in their at-least-partiallyaffected blacker-than-thou-ness) start leaning on Croker to speak out in favor of a black college athlete. Fareek "the Cannon" Fanon (also described as quite a physical specimen) is, perhaps, a rapist. If Croker plays his part, the mayor will get PlannersBanc to lay off its pressure; but then Croker's pals would, he fears, think badly of him: One fat cat is the father of the society princess who may have been raped by, or who may have simply been "hooking up" with, "the Cannon." Meanwhile, a mid-level PlannersBanc executive with the apt and Dickensian name (quite a few of those throughout) of Peepgas is plotting to get a big chunk of Croker real estate cheap. Wolfe also manages to include, in the Atlanta action, the racial and political awakening of a light-skinned black lawyer named Roger White II (or Roger Too White); Croker's first and second wives (the former 53 and thickening and wooed by Peepgas; the second a stunningly perfect "boy with breasts" of 28); and the developer's South Georgia plantation.

As if that weren't enough, on the other side of the country and in a different plotline, Conrad Hensley, 23-years old and too-soon married-with-wife-and-kids, works in a frozen-food warehouse (a holding of Croker's). Wolfe's attention to Hensley's appearance is, again, rapt. Soon enough, Hensley's been laid off (a cost-cutting move by Croker), has a hard time getting a job even though he's a terribly nice fella and, after a particularly bad day, gets arrested. He's thrown in the pokey and educated about jail life. In jail he becomes a devotee to the writings of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus and a disciple to Zeus. Really. Hensley then escapes during an earthquake-a true deus ex machina-that Hensley believes was caused by the deity.

These plots and others interweave with one another in what dust-jacket blurbs describe as a richly woven tapestry. But Wolfe demands a peculiar sort of inconsistent willing suspension of disbelief from the reader. Names are hyper-unrealistic; physical characteristics seem more symbolic than convincing. You keep hearing machinery whirring and grinding, particularly when the author attempts to make points-about race, about the Internet, about good old boys-that aren't fresh.

Croker is excellently drawn, full-blooded and believable at least to the degree that Wolfe's suspension-of-disbelief atmosphere requires. Hensley seems too saintly until his role in the later part of the book justifies that conceit, but that's a problem few of the other characters have. They are, by and large, short-sighted, acquisitive, vain creatures; people you'd have a hard time hanging around for 750 pages, were there not a greater reason to do so.

It turns out, there is. In a book as massive and eagerly awaited as this, you're really looking for two kinds of "aha" factors: One, you want to say, "Aha, Wolfe's nailed the Zeitgeist." Second, you want to say, as you do reading Dickens et. al., "Aha, so it turns out that the orphan is actually the half-brother of the beggar's benefactor, which is so ironic because that locket in Chapter 3 had the answer the whole time!" Or something. Neither really clicks in A Man in Full. Particularly frustrating is that they start to, as you head into what promises to be a delicious stretch in the last 100 pages of so. But then Wolfe ends things exactly as you would have expected, and has the few loose ends that remain tied up offstage in one of those unfortunate scenes where characters engage in conversations like: "Hey, what did happen to old what's-his-name, the guy who was the main focus of the book for the first section?" And then Character Two says, "Oh, didn't you hear, he did thus and so."

But here's the punchline. The novel works. Despite the audible machinery, the dislikable characters, the sometimes unrevealing revelations, the weak ending, A Man in Full gets in your head and resonates. The subtextual obsession with men's fondness for men and disregard for women, the appearance of the ancient philosopher, the constant point/counterpoint between the ideals held up by most of Wolfe's characters and the apparently laughable stoicism that Hensley subscribes to ... it all evokes a decrepit Rome, a society obsessed with society. Wolfe, with his overactive reporter's notebook, evokes a landscape of people doomed to vacuity. It certainly doesn't work quite the way one might expect a a typical page turner to. But it is a fun ride, and when you get to the final turn, and are initially disappointed, it asks you to reconsider the trip. Did you just read a novel about all kinds of fancy exciting things happening in the late '90s in the City Too Busy to Hate? Or did you just read a document about the state of the state at the end of the millennium? — Jerome Kramer

Library Journal

Imagine Bonfire of the Vanities set in Atlanta: a star running back from the slums is accused of raping the daughter of a blueblood family even as Asian immigrants sneak into town and protagonist Charlie Croker, a football star turned businessman, tries to get out of debt.

Newsweek - George F. Will

. ..[A] great rooftop yawp of a novel....it strikes chords of anxieties about the nation's character....more caricature than portraiture, although caricature can, and here does, rise to literature....America, seen steadily and whole, is better than this. Perhaps Wolfe's third novel will be a happier -- more realistic -- yawp.

The Washington Monthly - Matthew Cooper

This is an extraordinary novel: for its comedy, for its scope, for the way it evokes the Clinton '90s.....Bonfire of the Vanities was a warmup act. A Man in Full represents Wolfe at his best.

The Wall Street Journal - Andrew Ferguson

A masterpiece...From the author of Bonfire we expect the brilliant jokes, the dead-on dialogue, the dazzling scene-setting that mark every page of his new novel. But now we get something more. Is it sympathy? Generosity? I'm not sure what to call it. But it is the difference between seeing the world in slices and seeing it in full.

The American Spectator - John O'Sullivan

Wolfe takes characters of different backgrounds and social standing and traces how each of them pursues (and sometimes radically alters) his own concept of honor in a society that no longer offers them either compass or stars to steer by.

Time Magazine - Paul Gray

No summary of A Man in Full can do justice to the novel's ethical nuances and hell-bent pacing, its social sweep and intricate interweaving of private and public responsibilities, its electric sense of conveying current events and its knowing portraits of people actually doing their jobs. Who, besides Wolfe, would have thought that banking and real estate transactions could be the stuff of gripping fiction?

The New Yorker - John Updike

...[A] muscular opus.....warmed by the Southern setting....A Man in Full touches us with its grand ambition: a talented, inventive, philosophical-minded journalist....has gone for broke in this populous cyclorama of an Atlanta still at war.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

It's clear, almost from the start, that A Man in Full is a big if qualified leap forward for Mr. Wolfe as a novelist. The cartoonish cast of Bonfire -- a collection of physical and sartorial tics animated by heaps of authorial malice -- has been replaced by characters who bear more of a resemblance to real, sympathetic human beings, and Mr. Wolfe's novelistic canvas has expanded persuasively to include not merely the powerful and rich but also the poor and middle-class.

Newsweek, December 28, 1998 - January 4, 1999 - Malcolm Jones

Wolfe's high-spirited description of the decline and fall of Atlanta real estate developer Charlie Croker is the hands-down literary event of the year....He's hip-deep in rave reviews...."He stirs debate and makes people think," says Joyce Carol Oates.

Commentary - Christopher Caldwell

...Tom Wolfe has identified some of the real difficulties that best the modern novelist, and ...has made a strenuous effort -- a manly effort -- to show us what a remedy would look like....[H]e has fashioned vividly fresh scenes...and he has brought to bear spectacular satiric gifts.

Newsweek, December 7, 1998 - Malcolm Jones Jr.

Pundits like to talk about the Zeitgeist when they discuss Wolfe, but that's just fancy talk for the world we live in. Right now, no writer -- reporter or novelist -- is getting it on paper better than Tom Wolfe.

Vanity Fair - David Kamp

The freshness of the writing is remarkable...it's like the sun coming out.

USA Today - Dierdre Donahue

Superior...Utterly engrossing...A big triumph for Tom Wolfe.

What People Are Saying

Tom Wolfe
...[O]ne of the reasons it took me so long to write A Man in Full [was that] I did want to top Bonfire....I was under tremendous stress over finishing the book, so I would say that had something to do with my heart attack. ....the world is not out there waiting for your next book....I couldn't afford to spend 11 years on this book....I don't think it could be made into a movie. It would have to be five hours long.
— Interviewed in Entertainment Weekly, November 27, 1998

Paul Sorvino
It is a masterpiece-a really rich novel.

Tom Wolfe
'The book isn't anti-Atlanta, and it's not pro-Atlanta, just as Bonfire of the Vanities wasn't anti-New York or pro-New York. . . .What I've always been swept up in is the great journey of journalism, of discovery, what I call the objectivity of egotism. It's always been more important to me to discover something new in what I'm writing about and put it into brilliant prose than to make any political point on earth.'
— Interviewed in The New York Times, November 11, 1998

Mary Ann Byrnes
This book is a mockery of those who take the wrong things seriously (Mary Ann Byrnes is president and CEO, Corsair Communications).

Details from Seller

• ISBN: 0553381334
• Publisher: Dell Publishing
• Pub. Date: October 2001
• Condition:

Comments from the Seller: 2001-10-30 Paperback Good Paperback book in good condition. General wear, back cover is creased.

• Forewords & Introductions
• Read an Excerpt

Forewords & Introductions

Prologue: Cap'm Charlie

Charlie Croker, astride his favorite Tennessee walking horse, pulled his shoulders back to make sure he was erect in the saddle and took a deep breath . . . Ahhhh, that was the ticket . . . He loved the way his mighty chest rose and fell beneath his khaki shirt and imagined that everyone in the hunting party noticed how powerfully built he was. Everybody; not just his seven guests but also his six black retainers and his young wife, who was on a horse behind him near the teams of La Mancha mules that pulled the buckboard and the kennel wagon. For good measure, he flexed and fanned out the biggest muscles of his back, the latissimi dorsi, in a Charlie Croker version of a peacock or a turkey preening. His wife, Serena, was only twenty-eight, whereas he had just turned sixty and was bald on top and had only a swath of curly gray hair on the sides and in back. He seldom passed up an opportunity to remind her of what a sturdy cord no, what a veritable cable kept him connected to the rude animal vitality of his youth.

By now they were already a good mile away from the Big House and deep into the plantation's seemingly endless fields of broom sedge. This late in February, this far south in Georgia, the sun was strong enough by 8 a.m. to make the ground mist lift like wisps of smoke and create a heavenly green glow in the pine forests and light up the sedge with a tawny gold. Charlie took another deep breath . . . Ahhhhhh . . . the husky aroma of the grass . . . the resinous air of the pines . . . the heavy, fleshy odor of all his animals, the horses, the mules, the dogs . . . Somehow nothing reminded him so instantly of how far he had come in his sixty years on this earth as the smell of the animals. Turpmtine Plantation! Twenty-nine thousand acres of prime southwest Georgia forest, fields, and swamp! And all of it, every square inch of it, every beast that moved on it, all fifty-nine horses, all twenty-two mules, all forty dogs, all thirty-six buildings that stood upon it, plus a mile-long asphalt landing strip, complete with jet-fuel pumps and a hangar all of it was his, Cap'm Charlie Croker's, to do with as he chose, which was: to shoot quail.

His spirits thus buoyed, he turned to his shooting partner, a stout brick-faced man named Inman Armholster, who was abreast of him on another of his walking horses, and said:

"Inman, I'm gonna—"

But Inman, with a typical Inman Armholster bluster, cut him off and insisted on resuming a pretty boring disquisition concerning the upcoming mayoral race in Atlanta: "Listen, Charlie, I know Jordan's got charm and party manners and he talks white and all that, but that doesn't" dud'n"mean he's any friend of . . ."

Charlie continued to look at him, but he tuned out. Soon he was aware only of the deep, rumbling timbre of Inman's voice, which had been smoke-cured the classic Southern way, by decades of Camel cigarettes, unfiltered. He was an odd-looking duck, Inman was. He was in his mid-fifties but still had a head of thick black hair, which began low on his forehead and was slicked back over his small round skull. Everything about Inman was round. He seemed to be made of a series of balls piled one atop the other. His buttery cheeks and jowls seemed to rest, without benefit of a neck, upon the two balls of fat that comprised his chest, which in turn rested upon a great swollen paunch. Even his arms and legs, which looked much too short, appeared to be made of spherical parts. The down-filled vest he wore over his hunting khakis only made him look that much rounder. Nevertheless, this ruddy pudge was chairman of Armaxco Chemical and about as influential a businessman as existed in Atlanta. He was this weekend's prize pigeon, as Charlie thought of it, at Turpmtine. Charlie desperately wanted Armaxco to lease space in what so far was the worst mistake of his career as a real estate developer, a soaring monster he had megalomaniacally named Croker Concourse.

"—gon' say Fleet's too young, too brash, too quick to play the race card. Am I right?"

Suddenly Charlie realized Inman was asking him a question. But other than the fact that it concerned Andre Fleet, the black "activist," Charlie didn't have a clue what it was about.

So he went, "Ummmmmmmmmmmm."

Inman apparently took this to be a negative comment, because he said, "Now, don't give me any a that stuff from the smear campaign. I know there's people going around calling him an out-and-out crook. But I'm telling you, if Fleet's a crook, then he's my kinda crook."

Charlie was beginning to dislike this conversation, on every level. For a start, you didn't go out on a beautiful Saturday morning like this on the next to last weekend of the quail season and talk politics, especially not Atlanta politics. Charlie liked to think he went out shooting quail at Turpmtine just the way the most famous master of Turpmtine, a Confederate Civil War hero named Austin Roberdeau Wheat, had done it a hundred years ago; and a hundred years ago nobody on a quail hunt at Turpmtine would have been out in the sedge talking about an Atlanta whose candidates for mayor were both black. But then Charlie was honest with himself. There was more. There was . . . Fleet. Charlie had had his own dealings with Andre Fleet, and not all that long ago, either, and he didn't feel like being reminded of them now or, for that matter, later.

So this time it was Charlie who broke in:

"Inman, I'm gonna tell you something I may regret later on, but I'm gonna tell you anyway, ahead a time."

After a couple of puzzled blinks Inman said, "All right . . . go ahead."

"This morning," said Charlie, "I'm only gonna shoot the bobs." Morning came out close to moanin', just as something had come out sump'm. When he was here at Turpmtine, he liked to shed Atlanta, even in his voice. He liked to feel earthy, Down Home, elemental; which is to say, he was no longer merely a real estate developer, he was . . . a man.

"Only gon' shoot the bobs, hunh," said Inman. "With that?"

He gestured toward Charlie's .410-gauge shotgun, which was in a leather scabbard strapped to his saddle. The spread of buckshot a .410 fired was smaller than any other shotgun's, and with quail the only way you could tell a bob from a hen was by a patch of white on the throat of a bird that wasn't much more than eight inches long to start with.

"Yep," said Charlie, grinning, "and remember, I told you ahead a time."

"Yeah? I'll tell you what," said Inman. "I'll betcha you can't. I'll betcha a hundred dollars."

"What kinda odds you gon' give me?"

"Odds? You're the one who brought it up! You're the one staking out the bragging rights! You know, there's an old saying, Charlie: `When the tailgate drops, the bullshit stops.'"

"All right," said Charlie, "a hundred dollars on the first covey, even Stephen." He leaned over and extended his hand, and the two of them shook on the bet.

Immediately he regretted it. Money on the line. A certain deep worry came bubbling up into his brain. PlannersBanc! Croker Concourse! Debt! A mountain of it! But real estate developers like him learned to live with debt, didn't they . . . It was a normal condition of your existence, wasn't it . . . You just naturally grew gills for breathing it, didn't you . . . So he took another deep breath to drive the spurt of panic back down again and flexed his big back muscles once more.

Charlie was proud of his entire physique, his massive neck, his broad shoulders, his prodigious forearms; but above all he was proud of his back. His employees here at Turpmtine called him Cap'm Charlie, after a Lake Seminole fishing-boat captain from a hundred years ago with the same name, Charlie Croker, a sort of Pecos Bill figure with curly blond hair who, according to local legend, had accomplished daring feats of strength. There was a song about him, which some of the old folks knew by heart. It went: "Charlie Croker was a man in full. He had a back like a Jersey bull. Didn't like okra, didn't like pears. He liked a gal that had no hairs. Charlie Croker! Charlie Croker! Charlie Croker!"

Whether or not there had actually existed such a figure, Charlie had never been able to find out. But he loved the idea, and he often said to himself what he was saying to himself at this moment: "Yes! I got a back like a Jersey bull!" In his day he had been a star on the Georgia Tech football team. Football had left him with a banged-up right knee, that had turned arthritic about three years ago. He didn't associate that with age, however. It was an honorable wound of war. One of the beauties of a Tennessee walking horse was that its gait spared you from having to post, to pump up and down at the knees when the horse trotted. He wasn't sure he could take posting on this chilly February morning.

The two shooters, Charlie and Inman, rode on in silence for a while, listening to the creaking of the wagons and the clip-clopping of the mules and the snorts of the horses of the outriders and waiting for some signal from Moseby.

You could hear the low voice of one of the buckboard drivers saying, "Buckboard One to base . . . Buckboard One to base . . ." There was a radio transmitter under the driver's seat. "Base" was the overseer's office, back near the Big House. Buckboard One . . . Charlie hoped Inman and Ellen and the Morrisseys and the Stannards got the drift of that and were reminded that he had sent out four shooting parties this morning, four sets of weekend guests, with four buckboards (Buckboards One, Two, Three, and Four), four kennel wagons, four dog trainers, four sets of outriders, four of everything . . . Turpmtine was that big and that lavishly run. There was a formula. To send out one shooting party, with one pair of shooters, half a day each week for the entire season, which ran only from Thanksgiving to the end of February, you had to have at least five hundred acres. Otherwise you would wipe out your quail coveys and have no birds to shoot the following year. To send out one party all day once a week, you had to have at least a thousand acres. Well, he had 29,000 acres. If he felt like it, he could send out four parties all day, every day, seven days a week, throughout the season. Quail! The aristocrat of American wild game! It was what the grouse and the pheasant were in England and Scotland and Europe only better! With the grouse and the pheasant you had your help literally beating the bushes and driving the birds toward you. With the quail you had to stay on the move. You had to have great dogs, great horses, and great shooters. Quail was king. Only the quail exploded upward into the sky and made your heart bang away so madly in your rib cage. And to think what he, Cap'm Charlie, had here! Second biggest plantation in the state of Georgia! He kept up 29,000 acres of fields, woods, and swamp, plus the Big House, the Jook House for the guests, the overseer's house, the stables, the big barn, the breeding barn, the Snake House, the kennels, the gardening shed, the plantation store, the same one that had been there ever since the end of the Civil War, likewise the twenty-five cabins for the help he kept all this going, staffed, and operating, not to mention the landing field and a hangar big enough to accommodate a Gulfstream Five he kept all this going, staffed, and operating year round . . . for the sole purpose of hunting quail for thirteen weeks. And it wasn't sufficient to be rich enough to do it. No, this was the South. You had to be man enough to deserve a quail plantation. You had to be able to deal with man and beast, in every form they came in, with your wits, your bare hands, and your gun.

He wished there was some way he could underline all this for Inman. Inman's father had built up a pharmaceuticals company back at a time when that was not even a well-known industry, and Inman had turned it into a chemicals conglomerate, Armaxco. Right now he wouldn't mind being in Inman's shoes. Armaxco was so big, so diverse, so well established, it was cycleproof. Inman could probably go to sleep for twenty years and Armaxco would just keep chugging away, minting money. Not that Inman would want to miss a minute of it. He loved all those board meetings too much, loved being up on the dais at all those banquets too much, loved all those tributes to Inman Armholster the great philanthropist, all those junkets to the north of Italy, the south of France, and God knew where else on Armaxco's Falcon 900, all those minions jumping every time he so much as crooked his little finger. With a corporate structure like Armaxco's beneath him, Inman could sit on that throne of his as long as he wanted or until he downed the last mouthful of lamb shanks and mint jelly God allowed him whereas he, Charlie, was a one-man band. That was what a real estate developer was, a one-man band! You had to sell the world on . . . yourself! Before they would lend you all that money, they had to believe in . . . you! They had to think you were some kind of omnipotent, flaw-free genius. Not my corporation but Me, Myself & I! His mistake was that he had started believing it himself, hadn't he . . . Why had he ever built a mixed-use development out in Cherokee County crowned with a forty-eight-story tower and named it after himself? Croker Concourse! No other Atlanta developer had ever dared display that much ego, whether he had it or not. And now the damned thing stood there, 60 percent empty and hemorrhaging money.

The deep worry was lit up like an inflammation. Couldn't let that happen . . . not on a perfect morning for shooting quail at Turpmtine.

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